I have often wondered why men play football; now I know. It is because they are ego driven fools! There simply can not be any other reason for it! Every morning when he awakes, former Bronco Tom Glassic takes stock of the level of pain racking his body. Then he plans that day's medication and therapy regimen: a combination of pain pills, hot-tub sessions, stretching and usually a battle re-enactment with his prized collection of toy soldiers.
"I can still crawl around on the floor," Glassic says, in the self-deprecating and sardonic fashion that reflects his refusal to expect or accept pity. "As long as I can crawl around on the floor and play with my soldiers, I'm happy."
The starting guard on Denver's groundbreaking 1977 team, the first to make the Super Bowl and the one that generated an "Orange Crush" of wide-eyed, perhaps even naive enthusiasm in an evolving city with an inferiority complex, Glassic played eight seasons for the Broncos.
At 53, he has sciatica, compressed vertebrae and degenerative disc disease. His knees ache too. "One's bad, and one's getting worse," he says.
Still, many other NFL players would consider Glassic one of their more fortunate brethren for this reason: He fought for and - finally - won disability payments from the NFL and the National Football League Players Association. As the NFL is set to begin its 88th season, more attention than ever is focused on the league's former players.
Glassic's post-career physical problems are extreme, yet are part of a pattern, even among that '77 Denver roster. The game takes a toll, and 30 years later, those Broncos - like most other players who have passed through the team's dressing rooms since 1960 - in many cases live with maladies and daily pain.
There is running back Otis Armstrong, who has pain in his spine and neck, yet has the financial consolation of receiving an injury settlement from the Broncos and also succeeding in fighting through that NFL-NFLPA labyrinth to receive disability benefits.
Linebacker Tom Jackson and quarterback Craig Morton underwent knee replacements this year. It was Morton's third replacement, and he continues to have neck pains - in addition to a recent prostate cancer scare. Linebacker Randy Gradishar will face knee replacement in the future and has a mangled left ring finger. Running back Rob Lytle has had more than a dozen surgeries and has an artificial hip and shoulder.
Jim Turner, the high-top-wearing kicker on that team, has had a variety of health problems and underwent open-heart surgery in 2003.
"I've had three foot surgeries because they figured out I had kicked the ball 60,000 times and had broken my toe during that career," he says. "So in the third surgery last year, the surgeon put a titanium plate and three screws in my big toe in my kicking foot. I can't ever bend it again, but I don't have pain anymore.
"It's amazing, what all those kicks can do. Or about linebackers, who get their shoulders and necks torn up. There's always something you have to pay, no matter what position you play."
The roster also is dotted with other post-career issues, including some not directly traceable to the game.
Tackle Andy Maurer alarmingly ballooned to nearly 500 pounds before he underwent bariatric bypass surgery - stomach stapling - a year ago and began a gradual weight loss that doctors say saved his life.
Wide receiver Haven Moses is continuing his courageous recovery from a stroke, suffered in January 2003.
Retired Broncos guard Tom Glassic, seen with part of his prized collection of toy soldiers in his Park County home, is one of the lucky NFL retirees: He gets disability pay for his multiple injuries. "As long as I can crawl around on the floor and play with my soldiers, I'm happy," he says. (Post / John Leyba)Plus, five members of the '77 Broncos died of various forms of cancer - defensive ends Lyle Alzado (brain cancer, in 1992) and Paul Smith (pancreatic, 2000), quarterback Norris Weese (spinal, 1995), center Bobby Maples (Hodgkin's, 1991), and free safety Bernard Jackson (liver, 1997). Alzado attributed his cancer to his use of steroids since his college days and human growth hormone in his attempted comeback with the Raiders.
Clearly, some of the physical problems don't stem from on-field issues. Regardless, there are aching and/or replaced joints and painful reminders that with the glory comes a toll. The other common thread is in line with Glassic's attitude: They aren't asking for pity.
The team that qualified for Super Bowl XII against Dallas is just one in the Broncos' 47-year history and one team in the long history of the NFL, a league now under congressional fire for what has been portrayed - especially by former player and coach Mike Ditka, the point man in the fight - as an inexcusably cavalier attitude about disability and pension issues, most notably for players who were in the league before salary figures skyrocketed.
At recent congressional hearings, lawmakers heard that only 317 retired players have been approved for and receive disability benefits, totaling approximately $20 million a year. While that sounds like a lot of money, that averages out to a more modest $63,000 per disabled player per year. A Senate subcommittee is scheduled to hold another hearing Sept. 18.
One last time in the game
Armstrong played only through 1980, retiring at age 30. In his final season, he started only six games because of various injuries.
"Every time I got hit, even when I made sharp cuts, it hurt," he says. "It was like an awareness of where your limbs are in space. It was like my body's over here but I'm trying to go here, and I was having a lot of problems. It was scary because I didn't know what it was. When I told the doctors, I could see the concern on their faces. They said I was through. They said your spinal cord doesn't have much space in there and every time you wiggle around, it's a problem. I sneaked back in the game when we played against Houston, and I could see those doctors waving to the quarterback, 'Get him out of there!' Well, I carried it for a three-yard loss and they took me out. The doctors said, 'What were you doing in the game?' The coaches were saying, 'You should have gone outside!"'
His first fight was with the Broncos, over what he said he still was owed under the terms of his contract and the collective bargaining agreement.
"It took me a long time to get that," he says. In 1984, he pleaded guilty to one count of fraudulently obtaining the powerful and addictive painkiller Percodan, but he said he had done nothing wrong and the charge would have been too expensive to fight and that his pain made it hard to carry on a normal life. That conviction was removed from his record after a year. Then he succeeded in receiving disability payments. He remains one of the most popular Broncos among his former teammates and fans alike. "Best Muhammad Ali impersonation ever!" says Glassic, laughing.
Armstrong had spinal-cord surgery in 1996, and he jokes that one of his hobbies - in addition to monitoring his investments and being a doting grandfather - is listening to his bones pop. He can walk and interact without many noticeable problems, but anything close to athletic activity is too painful.
Glassic is in similar straits.
But they have the financial safety net of the disability benefits.
Most other retired players across the league are not as "lucky," and the congressional hearings have helped again shine the spotlight on such examples - albeit extreme ones - as the effect of Conrad Dobler's 11 knee surgeries or the dementia case of Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey.
The NFL and union say each active player surrenders an average of $82,000 annually for the benefit of retired players. Harold Henderson is the chairman of the NFL management council, which oversees the benefits program.
"In general, everybody here feels that the players who contributed to the growth and popularity of the game ought to be treated well," Henderson says. "There is a lot of concern about those who are in fact not well off financially, in particular those who are in need of health care and medical treatment.
"On the other side of it, I think there's a basic misunderstanding among the fans and former players about what the expectations should be. A person who works for any employer for four or six or even 10 or 15 years while in his 20s and 30s should not expect to get income for life from that employer."
The NFL retirement system has three components: pension, medical insurance and disability payments. The league believes the pension plan is adequate. Many players who complain about the pension plan took their payout at age 45, which was an option until 1993.
The disability payments - or their rarity - cause the most controversy.
Unexpected course
In the mid-1990s, Glassic couldn't block out either his mounting frustration or his escalating back pain, and doctors could promise only one thing: He was going to get worse.
That meant not just agonizing, wince-inducing aches, but financial uncertainty and the fear that he might have to sell his beloved home in the mountains in rural Park County.
He had tried and failed to receive disability payments under the NFL system, running afoul of a six-person board, plus disability thresholds expressed in percentages and the need to get physicians to agree that football caused the problems.
To Glassic, the one-time University of Virginia English major, it resembled a scene in a farcical novel.
"The board kept meeting on me, and it kept coming back deadlocked," Glassic says. "The three people assigned by the owners voted against me, the three assigned by the union voted for me."
He all but gave up.
He wondered how he would be able to support himself and even pondered trying to become a writer, perhaps chronicling the peculiarities and physical tolls of the sport he had ended up in not because of a passion that began in childhood but by accident.
When Glassic got to high school in Elizabeth, N.J., he had no intention of going out for the team. But his freshman homeroom teacher also happened to be the freshman football coach, and on the first day of class, before he had even taken roll, the teacher spotted the 215-pound kid and ordered him to report for football practice.
The game soon began to take its toll. He played only two games on that freshman team because he suffered broken fingers. In the first scrimmage during his sophomore year, he was clipped. His femur snapped.
"Everybody told me, 'That's it, you're not going to play football, you're not going to play sports. You'll walk with a limp the rest of your life.' But it healed. So then the next year, when I was a junior, I blew out my knee."
After again recovering, he was noticeable enough as a senior to receive a scholarship offer from Virginia. In 1972, Glassic was a starter by halfway through his freshman season - and started every game the rest of his college career, including for a team that won just once in his senior year.
Intrigued by his studies of Napoleon in history courses, Glassic began collecting toy soldiers.
"I got the other guys into it," he says. "We were playing war games on the (kitchen) table, all the Napoleonic battles."
Even today, a question about why he admires Napoleon can set off a Glassic monologue likely as long as any speech the Frenchman ever gave his troops.
The reflective guard was planning on being an English teacher. The NFL? He wasn't counting on it. The Broncos shocked him by taking him in the first round of the 1976 draft, and he signed what for then was a fairly standard contract for a player taken where he was. He got a $75,000 bonus, agreed to a rookie-season salary of $35,000, and started every 1976 game as a rookie.
"By the end of that first season, I was 240, 238, 237 pounds," he says. "You know they had weekly weigh- ins? You're fined $25 a pound for being overweight. Well, I'm fined $25 for being underweight!"
Even then, his back problems were beginning. "I had this perfect blocking form," he says. "I kept my back straight, and it was a battering ram."
He played through 1983, despite suffering additional severe injuries to both knees. After sitting out 1984, he tried to come back with Seattle in 1985. He flunked the Seahawks' physical, and doctors told him he didn't even have a functional anterior cruciate ligament in one knee.
"Crunch time"
Glassic had been fighting the pain for years. Back. Knees. Everywhere. He went into the toy-soldier business for a while but found it was a better hobby than vocation. Then he went to work for Camp Tomahawk, the Girl Scouts facility near his home.
"I was assistant caretaker," he says. Laughing, he added, "I had to join the Girl Scouts to get the job. I went through the candlelight ceremony with the other girls. And I was a Girl Scout for three and a half years before the back caught up with me."
A 1996 back surgery didn't help. He tried to return to work but had to quit. After his workers' compensation ran out, with no promise of future employment, he put his house up for sale.
"It was crunch time," he says.
Then the Social Security Administration came through with benefits. He also received a letter from the NFL that included an accounting of "supplemental" disability benefits the league had to send to all former players.
"If you do get disability from the NFL, you automatically get this other supplemental disability because of some lawsuit that happened years ago, forcing them to increase the payments," Glassic says.
That didn't directly affect Glassic, but it did plant the thought: It couldn't hurt to give it another shot. He again sought full disability benefits and, this time, after several examinations, he was approved in 1997.
"It was just an accident," he says. "I was really messed up at the time."
In the past 10 years, he has worsened, but at least he is financially secure.
"A couple of (former players) have called me, and what I tell them is, first of all, you have to have a doctor to back you up," he says. "And if a doctor says, 'Maybe he can work, and maybe he can't,' you've got no chance."
Although he periodically ponders other radical options and "new" operations, he is resigned to holding out as long as he can, then consenting to undergoing a spinal fusion - a risky and often unsuccessful surgery that would leave him with a steel rod in his back.
Glassic and Armstrong receive monthly disability checks, and Armstrong says that the check alone is not enough to completely support him and his family.
"It helps," he says.
His wife, Yvonne, works in the public schools, and they still live in the same Greenwood Village home they purchased while Otis was playing.
Glassic, whose disability breakthrough came much later, says his checks are enough for him to live on.
He makes infrequent trips down the mountain, including for an annual NFL physical.
Why?
"They have to make sure I'm still hurt."
Staff writer Mike Klis contributed to this report.